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The Wall Street Journal recently ranked Gary Hamel as the world’s most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy.”

Hamel’s landmark books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, include Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution and The Future of Management (selected by Amazon.com as the best business book of the year). His latest book, What Matters Now, was published in 2012.

Over the past twenty years, Hamel has authored 17 articles for the Harvard Business Review and is the most reprinted author in the Review’s history. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The Financial Times and many other leading publications around the world. He writes an occasional blog for the Wall Street Journal.

Since 1983, Hamel has been on the faculty of the London Business School, where he is currently Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management.

As a consultant and management educator, Hamel has worked for companies as diverse as General Electric, Time Warner, Nestle, Shell, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM, and Microsoft. His pioneering concepts such as “strategic intent,” “core competence,” “industry revolution,” and “management innovation” have changed the practice of management in companies around the world.

Hamel speaks frequently at the world’s most prestigious management conferences, and is a regular contributor to CNBC, CNN, and other major media outlets. He has also advised government leaders on matters of innovation policy, entrepreneurship and industrial competitiveness.

Currently, Hamel is leading a pioneering effort to reinvent management by harnessing the power of open innovation. The Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) is an online community where the world’s most progressive business leaders share their ideas on how to build organizations that are fit for the future and fit for human beings. The MIX is supported by a network of strategic partners, which includes McKinsey & Company, the Harvard Business Review and others.

Hamel is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and the Strategic Management Society. He lives in Northern California.

Blog Posts

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.

Bold innovations often take time. That’s why progress must be judged both in relation to the starting point as well as the final destination. For example, in America’s space program, the first successful docking of two orbiting spacecraft, the Gemini VIII capsule and the unmanned Agena target vehicle, took place on March 16, 1966. While this was an important milestone, it was still just an intermediate step in the long journey to land a human being on the moon. While the commander of Gemini VIII, Neil Armstrong, would ultimately walk on the moon, that wouldn’t happen until 1969.

In my experience, fundamental management innovation is also a multi-stage, multi-year process. This is true for several reasons. First, in a company that has been around for a while, it’s impossible to start from scratch and hazardous to move too quickly. Innovators in a decades-old company don’t have a clean sheet of paper. Moreover, they have to make sure that the business keeps running while they’re developing and testing their new management practices. That’s why the transformation at HCL is still a work in progress, and needs to be judged as such.

How’d you like to put a question to one of the world’s most inspired management innovators—a CEO who’s challenged a host of management orthodoxies? At the end of this post, I’ll explain how you can do just that.

As most MIXers know, I believe that many of the tools and methods we use to manage people at work are ill-suited to the challenges of succeeding in today’s “creative economy.” All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past—by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

Fair enough, you might say. Everybody knows there are downsides to management-as-usual, but are they any alternatives? We can dream about organizations where employees eagerly challenge their superiors, where honesty trumps deference and where the pyramid has been turned upside down—but then again, we can also dream about world peace and cold fusion. That doesn’t mean they’re achievable.

This sort of skepticism is understandable. After all, the technology of management varies little from firm to firm. Given that, it is easy, and rational, to assume that the management status quo is also...

Me in Three

I love big, vibrant cities and the quiet outdoors—so I feel lucky to be able to split my time between London and the Santa Cruz mountains in California. Cities are a great source of inspiration, and the forest and ocean are ideal venues for contemplation. I need both—maybe you do, too.

I’m a golfer. I know that is SO uncool. And it gets worse. I know of no other “sport” where the ratio of adrenaline over time is lower, nor where the correlation between intent and outcome is so close to zero. The fact that I golf testifies, I fear, to some deep, masochistic streak in my personality.

Another admission: I get a kick out of being a contrarian—a fact that drives my friends and colleagues a little bit crazy. Turns out, people don’t always appreciate it when you take a crowbar to their unexamined beliefs—I know I don’t. Challenging conventional wisdom is dirty work, but someone has to do it.